Tag Archives: Walter Reed

Stunning details emerging from the court martial of Maj. Nidal Hasan implicating the US Army brass in refusing to address Hasan’s evident extremism. Perhaps that’s why the judge in the case yesterday refused to admit prosecution evidence proving Hasan’s jihadist motives — to protect the military from their nonfeasance.

As Bill Gertz noted in a frontpage Washington Times article two months after the attack, myself and two of my colleagues had warned the entire US Army Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection command at their annual conference about internal jihadist threats, giving them all the radicalization indicators save Hasan’s name, rank and serial number. And then there’s Hasan’s infamous powerpoint presentation, which he gave more than two dozen times to military audiences, where he warned of “adverse events” if Muslims in the military weren’t granted conscientious objector status to avoid killing other Muslims in violation of Islamic law (killing infidels was apparently OK). In that presentation he noted past incidents of fratricide, desertion to the enemy, and refusal to deploy as examples of such “adverse events”.

NPR noted today a meeting held by senior Walter Reed officials in 2008, more than a year before the Ft Hood massacre, to discuss the problems related to Hasan:

When a group of key officials gathered in the spring of 2008 for their monthly meeting in a Bethesda, Md., office, one of the leading — and most perplexing — items on their agenda was: What should we do about Hasan?

Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials’ radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work.

Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan’s behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that “Islam can save your soul.”

Participants in the spring meeting and in subsequent conversations about Hasan reportedly included John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed; Robert Ursano, chairman of the Psychiatry Department at USUHS; Charles Engel, assistant chair of the Psychiatry Department and director of Hasan’s psychiatry fellowship; Dr. David Benedek, another assistant chairman of psychiatry at USUHS; psychiatrist Carroll J. Diebold; and Scott Moran, director of the psychiatric residency program at Walter Reed, according to colleagues and other sources who monitor the meetings.

NPR tried to contact all these officials and the public affairs officers at the institutions. They either didn’t return phone calls or said they could not comment.

But psychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?

And here’s the punchline:

One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

And yet his superiors did nothing. And for good reason. If anyone had actually taken action against Maj. Hasan, they would have been drummed out of the Army for religious discrimination. As Gen. Casey said days after the attack, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” And the cost of that “diversity” was fourteen souls.

By Kerry Picket:

Many continue to ask why the media and lawmakers have not spoken to or brought forth those who survived the deadly attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi last September. The truth of the matter is the Americans who survived that attack cannot legally reveal to members of the press or most lawmakers that they were even witnesses to the attack in Benghazi.

According to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, immediately following the attack, the FBI, as part of the agency’s investigation, interviewed survivors of the Benghazi attack.

Bill Bransford, a Washington, D.C. attorney at Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C. who specializes in federal employment law told Breitbart News on Tuesday, “First of all, I’m assuming that most of these people who witnessed the attack, except for the State Department folks, would be intelligence people, and they are not covered by the whistle blower protection laws.”

Bransford added, “They are covered by whatever policies their agency has. An executive order that President Obama issued in the late fall in which he ordered the intelligence community to come up with a more effective whistle blower protection system, which has not yet been developed.”

However, as federal employees, State Department personnel must sign non-disclosure agreements. Bransford stressed, “If somebody violates one of these non-disclosure agreements, the consequences could include: interfering with a criminal investigation, obstruction of justice, criminal charges for releasing classified information, and those are pretty serious.”

Serious indeed. The Obama administration’s Justice Department has prosecuted more federal employees for leaking information to the press under the 1917 Espionage Act than all other administrations combined. Bloomberg News reported last September:

“There’s a problem with prosecutions that don’t distinguish between bad people–people who spy for other governments, people who sell secrets for money–and people who are accused of having conversations and discussions,” said Abbe Lowell, attorney for Stephen J. Kim, an intelligence analyst charged under the Act.

Lowell, the Washington defense lawyer who has counted as his clients the likes of Jack Abramoff, the former Washington lobbyist, and political figures including former presidential candidate John Edwards, said the Obama administration is using the Espionage Act “like a club” against government employees accused of leaks.

The prosecutions, which Obama and the Justice Department have defended on national security grounds, mean that government officials who speak to the media can face financial and professional ruin as they spend years fighting for their reputations, and, in some cases, their freedom.

Since Breitbart News first broke in December that the Obama administration was hiding Benghazi attack survivors, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) began demanding the FBI hand over to Congress the interviews the agency conducted with individuals who survived the deadly attack.